Apple Alum Builds App to Help Millions in Indian Slums Find Jobs

India’s cities are home to millions of low-skilled workers—drivers, masons, deliverymen, and others—who hail from villages hundreds of miles away. These people crowd into shantytowns and slums, scratching out a living on the margins with virtually no safety net. So when India went into lockdown in March, millions of migrant laborers found themselves out of work, penniless, and far from home. In the following weeks, these people hit the road en masse, often walking alongside highways for days with their children and meager possessions on their shoulders, backs, and heads, returning to their villages. Now, as India starts to reopen, those millions are reluctant to go back to cities until they can be certain there’s work. Nirmit Parikh says he can help.

Parikh, a 32-year-old Apple Inc. alum with an MBA from Stanford, has created Apna, which he envisions as a sort of LinkedIn for non-English-speaking, nonaffluent Indians. When these people move to the cities, they typically find work via small-time employment agencies or on street corners crowded with men and women waiting for someone to hire them for a few hundred rupees a day. With Apna, job seekers enter their name, age, and skills to generate a virtual “business card” that’s passed out to employers in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, with more cities on the way. “A digital business card is a confidence booster for many who’ve only seen their super bosses carry business cards,” Parikh says. “We want to give millions of bottom-of-pyramid workers a career path.”